The passage from Chillingworth is as follows:

"I fear you will repent the time that ever you urged it against us that we make man's salvation depend upon uncertainties, for the objection returns upon you many ways: as first thus, The salvation of many millions of Papists (as they suppose and teach) depends upon their having the sacrament of penance truly administered unto them. This again depends upon the minister's being a true priest. That such or such a man is priest, not himself, much less any other, can have any possible certainty, for it depends upon a great many contingent and uncertain supposals. He that will pretend to be certain of it must undertake to know for a certain all these things that follow. First, that he was baptized with due matter. Secondly, with the due form of words, which he cannot know unless he were both present and attentive. Thirdly, he must know that he was baptized with due intention, and that is that the minister of his baptism was not a secret Jew, nor a Moor, nor an Atheist (of which kind I fear experience gives you a just cause to fear that Italy and Spain have priests not a few), but a Christian in heart as well as profession (otherwise believing the sacrament to be nothing, in giving it he could intend to give nothing), nor a Samosatian, nor an Arian, but one that was capable of having due intention, from which they that believe not the doctrine of the Trinity are excluded by you. And lastly, that he was neither drunk nor distracted at the administration of the sacrament, nor out of negligence or malice omitted his intention. Fourthly, we must undertake to know that the Bishop which ordained him priest ordained him completely with due matter, form, and intention; and, consequently, that he again was neither Jew nor Moor nor Atheist, nor liable to any such exception as is unconsistent with due intention in giving the sacrament of orders. Fifthly, he must undertake to know that the Bishop which made him priest was a priest himself; for your rule is Nihil dat quod habet,' and consequently, that there was again none of the former nullities in his baptism which might make him incapable of ordination, nor no invalidity in his ordination, but a true priest to ordain him, again the requisite matter and form and due intention all concurring. Lastly, he must pretend to know the same of him that made him priest, and him that made him priest even until he comes to the very fountain of priesthood. In fine, to keep

this one thing, you must first know ten thousand others whereof not any one is a thing that can be known, there being no necessity that it should be true, which only can qualify anything for an object of science, but only at the best a high degree of probability that it is so. But then that of ten thousand probables no one should be false, that of ten thousand requisites whereof any one may fail not one should be wanting, this to me is extremely improbable and even cousin-german to impossible."

No. XXI.

CERTAIN COMMENTS ON ROMAN CATHOLIC STATEMENTS, THE CHARGE OF FORGERY.

ONE might reasonably have hoped that the style of theological controversy current in the seventeenth century, would not have been disinterred. But in the Letters on Anglican Orders, of Mr. John Williams, a Roman Catholic clergyman, a line is adopted which it is impossible with patience to notice, and which deserves the severest reprehension of all literary men. Any book or document which plainly and palpably tells against, or completely overthrows, the theory he sets up, is at once characterized as a forgery by this very rash author.

For example, at p. 101 of his Letters, he writes as follows:"The first case I take is from Mason, who, in his edition of 1625, thus alludes to the celebrated conference between John Hart and John Rainolds :'When John Hart, thirty years ago, denied our orders, as you do now, the learned Rainolds, out of the Registers of Edmund Freak, by whom he was ordained a priest, and out of Matthew Parker's Registers, by whom Freak was ordained Bishop, transcribed the consecrations, which when Hart saw, he presently confessed that he thought nothing of that nature could be produced, and therefore agreed that the whole argument should be erased and expunged out of the Conference, that it might not be printed, being then to go to the press.'

"If there were any proof in this, it would merely give the date 1583, the year in which the conference took place. But not one particle of proof is here, even to that extent. It is the ipse dixit of one man, Rainolds, and that man not worthy of credit. I have the book of the conference now before me. It is a bulky, black-letter quarto of some seven hundred pages, printed by John Wolfe. London : 1584. The book itself is a fraud and a lie! I do not deny that a Conference was held between Hart and Rainolds; but I do deny, from internal evidence, that this is a true report of the same."(pp. 101, 102).

Now here were certain most inconvenient facts. A controversy had taken place between an Anglo-Roman-Catholic and a member of the Church of England, in which the arguments

*Second Edition. London: 1867.

used on both sides were set forth at great length. That public controversy notoriously took place more than twenty years before Holywood first published his story of the Nag's Head Fable. At the close of the controversy a full and complete account was immediately published in London in 1584-only twenty-five years after Parker's consecration, and exactly twenty years previous to the origination of the Fable just alluded to. This book received considerable attention. It was referred to, and quoted from, by several controversialists on both sides. Yet, with a calm assurance at which it is impossible not to wonder, this Mr. Williams-because the book under consideration contains indisputable proof of the existence of Parker's Register, and still further of the fact that it was then known to exist, and was referred to-at once sweeps the evidence aside with this curt remark:-"The book itself is a fraud and a lie!" Such assertions as these do not need to be answered. A fair statement of the case in question makes one wonder at the hopefulness of those who imagine that any cause could be advanced by such unworthy and discreditable tactics. The same style and mode of controversy are the only remarkable features of the book, which is indeed a literary curiosity.

further

A similar charge against the volume, De Antiquitate Britannica Ecclesia is also made, for a similar reason, a few pages on, in the following passage :

"Another fact alleged in support of the Register, is the Life of Parker in the work entitled De Antiquitate Britannica Ecclesiæ; and printed in London, by John Day, in 1572, three years before Parker's decease. The book consists of the lives of Seventy Archbishops of Canterbury, Parker himself being the seventieth. In this Life of Parker, the Lambeth Consecration is referred to, as having been performed on December 17th, by Barlow, Scory, Coverdale, and Hodgkins. There was also a marginal note referring to the registers, thus worded:- Hæ confirmationes et consecrationes in registris apparent.' These confirmations and consecrations appear in the registers. There are also two tables: one displaying the armorial bearings, both episcopal and private, of all the Anglican Bishops at that time, 1572, occupying the English Sees; Parker's being conspicuously placed in the centre of the page: the other being a list of all their names and dioceses, their degrees, order, native county, age, and date of consecration. The work itself is ascribed to Parker; and as to the authorship of sixty-nine of the lives, together with the date 1572 as regards them, I am not disposed to cavil. But with regard to the seventieth-the Life of Parker-and the date 1572 as connected with it, I unhesitatingly denounce it as an imposture. It was annexed afterwards, and even a long time afterwards, to the rest of the

work; that is, supposing the date of the principal part of the work to be the year 1572."

Now, with regard to this second charge of forgery-here characterized as "an imposture,”-it need only be pointed out that the obvious reason why it has been so characterized by Mr. Williams is, that it likewise plainly testifies to certain facts which wholly and altogether overthrow that person's ungrounded assumptions. For that they are ungrounded will be evident from the following extract from an Original Letter to Burleigh, published by Strype. Still further, an inspection of the volume at Lambeth, to which Parker's son, John, added MS. notes and original documents, would show at once how perfectly gratuitous and random are the charges of forgery and imposture which Mr. Williams thought it becoming to bring, in order to bolster up a conclusion drawn from no premisses whatever. Here is a portion of the Letter published by Strype, which explains the reason of Parker undertaking the work, and at the same time accounts for the small number of copies now existing :

"You maye note many varities in my doinges; but I thought it not against my profession to express my tymes, and gyve som testimonyes to my fellowe-brothers, of such of my coat as were in place in her Majestie's reigne, and when I was thus placed. And though ye maye rightly blame an ambitiouse fantasye for setting out our churches armes in colors, yet ye may relinquyshe the leaffe and cast it into the fyre; as I have joyned it but lose in the book for that purpose, yf you so thinke it mete, and as ye maye, if it so please you (without gret gryef to me), cast the whole boke the same waye. Which boke I have not govyn to iiii men in the whole realme, and peradventure shall never come to sight abroade, though som men smelling of the prynting of it seame to be very desirouse cravers of the same. I am contente to referre it wholly to your jugement, to stond or to fall. To kepe it by me I yet purpose whiles I lyve, to add and to amende as occasion shal serve me, or utterly to suppress it and to bren it. And thus making your Lordship pryvye to my folyes, and for that I have within my house in wagis, drawers and cutters, paynters, lymners, wryters and boke-bynders, I was the bolder to take myn occasion thus, equitare in arundine longa. So, spending my wastful tyme within myn own wallys, tyl Almighti God shal cal me out of this tabernacle, which I pray God may be to his glory, and my soule helthe, I say, ut obdormiam in Domino, et requiescam in pace, in spe resurrectionis cum Christo Servatore meo."-Letter of Archbishop Parker to the Lord Treasurer, Burleigh, concerning the Antiquitates Britannica.

66

THE CHARGE OF FORGERY.

Any one who disbelieves the Acts recorded in those Registers, ought, if he is consistent, to disbelieve also Queen Elizabeth's